AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[LordEC911]

I think AMD still wants to keep the card around 400nm and keep power reasonable. Adding twice as much memory and increase the speed is already going to add alot. 50% more shaders is going to add quite a bit as well. And if these shaders are used properly, they are probably going to consumer more watts pers shader.

They have reworked Cypress' MC and they are a little bit better as far as power efficiency goes. Even though it is double the memory they are double the density, supposedly, and on a lower node which should decrease power consumption slightly compared to the HD5870 2Gb models which I believe added a good ~30-40w over the stock HD5870. Obviously having 2Gb will increase power consumption but it wouldn't be as much as last gen's 2Gb versions.

My figures may be off a bit, but if Cayman XT is for argument's sake 10% slower than a 580, I would expect it to be more than 10% off of the 580's price overall (more like 15-17% less) since they need a bigger incentive to settle for less (same goes for if Cayman XT is faster than the 580, of course...). The top card always carries a bigger premium in respect to price/performance, and I expect amd/nvidia will capitalize on that whichever way the pendulum swings here.

I would expect GTX580 and Cayman to at least be trading blows, since Cayman was targetting +10-15% on a full specced GTX480 w/ 512SPs. So even if they miss the mark a bit or GTX580 gets a bit more performance, there shouldn't be a huge difference in performace. I just hope that they will have Cayman Pro at or slightly above GTX480 levels of performance.